Last
Interview
(given
to the Portuguese film maker Manoel Cavalheiro, in Paris, 1981)
"Brazil is this great seed planted by Dom Manoel,
the Venturous, far beyond the never before navigated seas. Africa was converted
a Portuguese colony, suffered the colonialist process and then liberated. Today,
the independent Africa - the so called Portuguese Africa - has little
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to do with Portugal. But Brazil does. Brazil is the
beans. Brazil is where everything blends. It is where the black, the white and
the indigenous get mixed toghether as well as all kinds of religion. A Luso-Afro-tropical
civilization sprouted as the result of Infant Don Henrique's dream, to decipher,
on in the cosmic domain, this great mystery. (...)" "I exert a pioneering
work. I decipher the hidden paths in the forests, I face the tempests in the deserts,
I challenge the lava of the volcanoes to be able to show the enlightened moments
and the moments of revelation. (...) I persevere on my positions of a Third World-oriented
cinema. A cinema independent from the economic and artistic point of view. A cinema
that does not let aesthetic creativity disappear in the name of a commercial objectivity
and of a political immediatism. There is no advantage in doing films with a revolutionary
content if, in the form, you imitate the French nouvelle vague, the German expressionism
or the North-American commercialism. The Third World film makers' problem is to
find their personal style. This is the triumph of the artist. (...)"
"I am a film maker who works slowly. In twenty-five
years' work, I have made seven long-length and eight other films. I need two
or two and a half years to make a film. During this time, I write and read.
I have already written two books, I am working out novels, because I find myself
in a phase of great literary speculation. I am not a film maker anymore. To
me, being a film maker is just an intellectual activity. I am not a professional
film maker anymore. In 1970, no one understood when, after my worldwide consecration,
I closed my production company in Brasil and became an independent intellectual.
I am connected to Cocteau's spirit. I am a poet,
writer, critic, painter as well - although I have not shown my drawings
or my paintings yet - and I am a musician. I do cinema because it is the synthesis
of the arts. But being a film maker nowadays is a lamentable thing. The intellectual
atmosphere of cinema was corrupted by the commercialism. Thus, today, I define
myself as an independent intellectual who, among other things, makes films.
But I might stage a theatre play, open a psychoanalysis office or become a literature
lecturer. I did television in Brasil. The modern intellectual is a multiple
communicator. The time of the specialists is over."(...)
ŠTempo Glauber